News About This Theater

The Mentor Mall Cinema opened in the mid-1970’s, then was remodeled into an eight-plex when Mentor Mall became Erie Commons. General Cinema closed the theatre in 1998. It was demolished a few years later.

The Mentor Mall was a small covered shopping center across the street from the huge Great Lakes Mall, and patronage in the Mentor Mall was minimal. Many of the original stores left for the big mall across the street. The Cinema was built as 3 screens, and as stores ajoining the theatre left the mall, GCC gradually added 5 more auditoriums in the vacant space. None of the original 3 auditoriums were divided because they were already pretty narrow.

I saw my first PG movie on July 4th of 1975 or 1976 whatever summer “JAWS” was released there at the Mentor Mall. I road my orange banana bike up to this new Cinema across the way from the Great Lakes Mall Cinema. I was 13 at the time. I saw the enlarged parking lot from the demolishion just several weeks ago. It brought back many memories of my childhood in the 70’s in Mentor.

Actually, this theater closed sometime in 2001. On Memorial Day Weekend of 2002, a group of juveniles broke into the theater and destroyed almost everything. Damage was done to the lobby, restrooms, projection booth, several theaters, carpet, seats, and a couple screens were damaged, making this incident Mentors most extensive act of vandalism in history. The theater was probably torn down as a result of this since the damage was so extensive that no other operator would have been interested in managing this theater.

When it opened as a triplex, the entrance was inside the mall; when GCC expanded it to eight, a new outside entrance was created at the side of the mall that faced Johnny Cake Ridge Road and the interior entrance closed off.

The original entrance in the mall looked very similar to that of the Randall Park Cinema, but without the big stairway, though maybe there were 2 or 3 steps, my recollection is a little fuzzy on that. It was narrow, with an un-enclosed box office sitting in the middle. Further into the lobby, the concession stand was on the right side of the room and the auditorium entrances on the left. Between the theatre entrance and the mall entrance that faced Ridge Rd. there were maybe 3 very small stores, maybe only 10-15 feet deep because they were backed up against the side wall of the auditorium. One of the stores sold medieval armor kind of stuff. I was there when they delivered the safe – before the roof was put on the building, they lifted the safe with a crane and set it in place where the office would be built.

The roadside sign for the theatre stood for a few years after the building itself disappeared. When I finally tracked down mall management about obtaining one of the signs, they had just disposed of them. A friend did end up with some of the marquee letters…all that’s left of the cinema.

The original mall had an odd collection of stores including a couple high end retailers like Kelly-Kitt women’s clothing that never went into Great Lakes Mall. The larger mall was unique among Cleveland malls in never attracting really high end retailers. The lobby was small and I seem to recall lining up in the mall space for really popular films like “Young Frankenstein”. Doubtful that vandalism would have left to demolition—more likely the opportunity to repurpose the space. Mentor has survived worse than what you described.